"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resting against Luigi's; weariness had overcome him, and for the past five minutes he had been peacefully sleeping. The old ladies had dropped their voices to a lulling drone, to help him to steal the rest his brother wouldn't take him up-stairs to get. Luigi listened a moment to Angelo's regular breathing, then said ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... to one who has come into a knowledge of Truth. Drones have no place in the Divine Plan. It is not only essential but mandatory, that each one do his part for the common good. The non-producing rich man is as much a drone as is the vagabond who neither toils nor spins. The Biblical test concerning the difficulty of the rich man getting into Heaven means that it is impossible for a drone or parasite to ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... mobs to banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... did the Tonneraire thus prove herself a crack ship. A crack ship with a crack crew and officers, remember; for the best of ships is but a drone unless well managed. Not even a drone, indeed; for a drone is a most duty-full bee, and a most respectable member of the apiarian republic. There is a vast deal of very indifferent music in the very best of fiddles, and I feel quite convinced that had some less active officer commanded even the Tonneraire, ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... be seen, therefore, that all young persons should endeavor to make each day stand for something. Neither heaven nor earth has any place for the drone; he is a libel on his species. No glamour of wealth or social prestige can hide his essential ugliness. It is better to carry a hod, or wield a shovel, in an honest endeavor to be of some use to humanity, than to be nursed in luxury and be ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... not long beards, carried THEIR tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation. Meanwhile, the chaunting was very monotonous and dreary. The procession passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making a brilliant ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... space between the glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... made a fair copy of his prologue; Moliere contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, "we leave ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... honour lay in me, From me by strong assault it is bereft. My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee, Have no perfection of my summer left, But robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft: In thy weak hive a wandering wasp hath crept, And suck'd the honey ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... mildly read newspapers; others lounged, half-standing against their desks, unlighted cigars in their mouths, laughing; all the while the patient Speaker tapped with his gavel on a small square of marble. Suddenly perfect calm would come and the voice of the reading clerk drone for half an hour or more, like a single bee in a country garden on ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... beer for the three of them, and they leant against the bar and whispered in sullen accents. Something had evidently miscarried with the Ring. Mrs. Dawes continued to whine above the general drone of the bar. Suddenly ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... (An air on the drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... to find so cautious a man as Addington at this period speaking of the Church as "an honest drone, who, if she did not stir herself very soon, would be stung by the wasps of the conventicle." The metaphor is not good for much, for the drone can sting too, and does nothing but sting. But what is it that, at any time, makes the church ineffective? The abuse of the ministerial patronage. The clergy altogether depend on the guidance, the character, and the activity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... do with what many of them believed to be artificial aids to religion. It was a fine sight to see the leader of the songsters shut his eyes, clap his hands, and with strong nasal blasts—which resembled the drone of the immortal instrument that is the terror of the English and the glory of the Scottish people—"raise the hymn," while, as the others joined in the singing, the volume of sound swelled louder and ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... of the bagpipe every day, at Armidale, Dunvegan, and Col. Dr. Johnson appeared fond of it, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... off, and there is no school. But the clergyman is not fit to be heard, he is such a drone in the pulpit; and it is a sweet employment to train one's own children, who thus avoid contamination by not associating with ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Gregorian notes, and can be little less ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of our nation's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... strong and rugged her commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have you ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... storm together; while that Drone, 'Your poor old Uncle, WALTER, liv'd alone. 'He died the other day: when round his bed 'No tender soothing tear Affection shed— 'Affection! 'twas a plant he never knew;— 'Why should he feast ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... landscapes, while good folk are at home curling their toes in the warm bottom of the bed, the Owl trains rumble with a gentle drone, neither fast ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... surly Winter's flown, That the brook's verge is green;—and bid thee hear, In yon irriguous vale, the Blackbird clear, At measur'd intervals, with mellow tone, Choiring [1]the hours of prime? and call thine ear To the gay viol dinning in the dale, With tabor loud, and bag-pipe's rustic drone To merry Shearer's dance;—or jest retail From festal board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... nothing, absolutely nothing. I looked through the pile twice. A family reunion and they had not notified me! I had become as detached as all that! I glanced at Esther again. She was scratching away like mad. I heard the drone of a hurdy-gurdy outside. I would not stay here. The thought of a holiday in Irving Place became suddenly unendurable. I must escape it somehow. There was a train north an hour later. My ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... attempted to escape to Newfoundland in the pinnace they would arrive at the gallows; the sick should not starve; every man able must work, and every man who did not gather as much in a day as he did should be put out of the fort as a drone. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... stand a little in the rear. The old Sheik dismounted; and followed by another graybeard, likewise advanced. When the distance was but about eight feet between them, both halted. Silence continued, broken only by the dull drone of one engine still running on board the ship, by the creaking of saddle-leather, the whinny ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... heard passed by him merely as a sound, noted no more than the lowing of the cattle, or the drone of the thrashing machine. He lay half lifted up on his pillows, drawing his breath short with apprehension; his days were numbered, and death was coming fast, fast, straight upon him. He felt it within himself—he knew now the meaning of the pain and sinking, the shortness ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle that rest ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... They made up a lair for me with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... hard at it, practising his favourite arts. His sake cup stood before him, and from time to time he raised the bottle from the hot water, testing its temperature with skilled hand. He accompanied the action with a continual drone of a gidayu. Kwaiba by no means confined the art of gidayu recitation to the heroic tales usually therewith associated. His present effort was one of the suggestive and obscene ukarebushi, quite as frequent ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... for a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... all the big carnivores and poisonous reptiles, only to be laid low by the smallest beast of them all. Well, he had the remedy for this one, too. Rolling up his sleeve with shaking fingers, he pressed the mouth of the medikit to his bare arm. It clicked and began to drone an angry whine. That meant something, he knew, but he just couldn't remember what. Holding it up he saw that one of the hypodermics was projecting halfway from its socket. Of course. It was empty of whatever antibiotic the analyzer had ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... the altar the procession divided into halves, fifteen upon the east side of the chancel, fifteen upon the west. The organ began to drone and murmur, the censers swung and smoked, the candle-flames flared and attracted the bats that lived among the rafters overhead. Buelna knelt before the Mother Superior. She was pale and a little thin from fasting ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... mighty vessel as she had been, the heave of the fathomless sea below, the whirling battle-smoke about her, the air full of the crashing thunder of her guns as she quivered 'neath their discharge. I heard the humming drone of shells coming from afar, a hum that grew to a wail—a shriek—and the sickening crash as they smote her or threw up great waterspouts high as her lofty fighting-tops; I seemed to hear through it all the ring ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... no doubt. He was a bee, and Sam was a drone, and the drones are always ready to avail themselves of the accumulations ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... minute, I will sing you something about love," cried Wawrzecki, and he proceeded to drone ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... frosts; ramparts against incursions of the enemy. Everything is in order, at least so she thinks; but, alas, what a mistake the poor mother is making! Here the hateful fatality stands revealed, aspera fata, which ruins the producer to provide a living for the drone; here we see the stupid and ferocious law that sacrifices the worker for the idler's benefit. What have we done, we and the insects, to be ground with sovran indifference under the mill-stone of such wretchedness? Oh, what terrible, what heart-rending questions the ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... met that first day beside the great rock. It seemed to them both a long time ago, and the valley was like a friend smiling up at them its welcome and its gladness that they had at last returned. Its drone of running waters, the whispering music of the air, and the piping cries of the marmots sunning themselves far below, came up to them faintly as they rested, and as the Girl sat in the circle of David's arm, with her head against his breast, she pointed off through the blue ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Copyright is defined by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques recognized it for the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the latter? Thousands of cooing doves, legions of chattering parrots, made the air vocal; millions of little birds of every size and hue twittered an accompaniment, and myriads of mosquitoes and other insects filled up the orchestra with a high pitched drone, while alligators and other aquatic monsters beat time with flipper, fin, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... events. I noticed that my neighbour was the fellow 'Mwanga whom I had kicked out of the store. Happily I was so dusty that he could scarcely recognize me, but I kept my face turned away from him. What with the light and the warmth, the drone of the water, the silence of the folk, and my mental and physical stress, I grew drowsy and all ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... it not, dearest husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us is full ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... is an explosion of sound under the decent person's window, and a hand-organ starts off with a jerk like a freight train on a down grade, that joggles a whole string of crashing notes. Then it gets down to work, and its harsh, high-pitched, metallic drone makes the street ring for a moment. Then it is temporarily drowned by a chorus of shrill, small voices. The person—I am afraid his decency begins to drop off him here—leans on his broad window-sill and looks out. The street is filled with children of every ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... lips, Trembl'd and started, and let down her brow, Hiding its sudden rose on Malcolm's arm. "Max Gordon? Yes. Was he a friend of yours?" "No friend of mine, but of the lassie's here— "How comes he on? I wager he's a drone, "And never will put honey in the hive." "No drone," said Alfred, laughing; "when I left "He and his axe were quarr'ling with the woods "And making forests reel—love steels a lover's arm." O, blush that stole from Katie's swelling heart, And with its hot rose brought the happy dew Into her hidden ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... the tappers hard at work upon the benches, while every now and then came a musical cyclone of "Incomparable! Divine!" from the trained phalanx who intoned their applause, their united voices sweeping over the tumult as the drone of the wind dominates the roar of the sea. It was madness—insufferable madness! If this were allowed to pass, there was an end of all musical justice in Greece. Policles' conscience would not permit him to be still. Standing upon his ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... surely shall accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and then ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... unpeopled, pure, immutable in their calm; stars that came down at night and hung just over your head, making the darkness alive with their bright presence; a little cottage hunched against a hill, a candle winking cheerily through the window at the stars; the cries of night birds, the drone of insects, the distant howling of a coyote; far away on the boundary of your possessions, a fence of barbed wire stretching through a hollow and up over a hill; distance and quiet and calm, be it day or night. And Helen May coming ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... early, that it is said they frequently "catch the birds by their tails as they are going to roost;" and it is no doubt owing to this that they are so 'cute. Talk about "catching a weasel asleep," let me see any of my metropolitan drone friends who can catch a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... philosopher proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's mail. "Florence was a devil—Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"—with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars—"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after—after we had found that we had not as much money ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... drone the monotonous count; at eight Jefferson gathered himself together; at nine he was on ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the rail; and deep the drone Of insects makes the country lone With summer where the water sleeps: She hears him singing as he swings His scythe—who thinks of other things Than ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... The Scientist's voice went on and on like the drone of an electric fan, interrupted only by an occasional murmur from Mother or Dad. For a while David sat in bed twisting the sheets in his hands; then he got up and paced the room in his bare feet. It seemed to him that three or four whole nighttimes had passed before he finally heard all ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... buckled down to work at home, and in one point only father and son resembled—industry. A drunkard M'Adam was, but a drone, no. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... to the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If a London ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... which he had come out, and by which he had now to return, since his seminary bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as he shot in air, Crept under the leaf, and hid her there; The katy-did forgot its lay, The prowling gnat fled fast away, The fell mosquito checked his drone And folded his wings till the Fay was gone, And the wily beetle dropped his head, And fell on the ground as if he were dead; They crouched them close in the darksome shade, They quaked all o'er with awe and fear, For they had felt the blue-bent ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... some subsequent period. There are houses in Spring Street, and there is a confectioner's shop; but it is not often that a sound comes across its rugged pavements, save perchance (in summer) the drone of an ancient hand-organ, such as might have been devised by Adam to console his Eve when Paradise was lost. Yet of late the desecrating hammer and the ear-piercing saw have entered that haunt of ancient peace. May it be long ere any such invasion reaches those strange little wharves ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... ta right, Mistress Partan, and tat you'll pe seeing," said Duncan, who, hearing her first cry, had stopped his drone, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... a chance," he said, and old Joel looked pleased, for it was plain that the little stranger was not going to be a drone in the household, and, taking his pipe from his mouth but without turning ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... as Ida May Bostwick. Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circumstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night. The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner's hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the shore were accompaniments to their ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... supply the girl's wants was done. Whether it was a continuous supply of peat for the fire in these chilly April days; or a newspaper from the town; or a bundle of daffodils from the wood below—some signs of a fatherly mind he was always showing towards this little drone in the hive. And Laura delighted in him—racked her brains to keep him talking by ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to rouse him. But I was by this time so weary that I could have slept twelve hours at a stretch; I had the taste of sleep in my throat; my joints slept even when my mind was waking; the hot smell of the heather, and the drone of the wild bees, were like possets to me; and every now and again I would give a jump and find I ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shadows and the rising drone of night sounds and the whispering of the breeze which was all that was left of the wind, the man came riding cautiously up through a draw to the willow growth just below Sinkhole watering place. He ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... upon the saddle with another yell as he pushed the machine before him, and the next instant was whirling down the thoroughfare with the rapidity of an express train, bawling for people to "Stand clear!" In another moment he was out of sight, in a cloud of dust, and his yells fell to a drone in the distance. ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... that she would be looking for him. Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming. She would cry ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... interflitting bird, Or wooden squeak of tree-frog as it grieves. The resting eye broods o'er the running grass, Or nodding gestures of the bowed wild oats; Watches the oleander lancers pass, And the bright flashing of the oriole notes. Hushed are the senses with the drone of bees And the far glimmer of the mid-day heat; Dreams stealing o'er one like the incoming seas, Soft as the rustling zephyrs in the wheat; While on the breeze is borne the call of Love To Love, dear Love, of ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the second one to be flown and that, with the exception of the ill-fated Hadley, farther from the earth than any man had been before. There was no sensation of movement in that hermetically sealed flyer, and, after the first few moments, the steady drone of the rocket motor failed to register on my senses. I was surprised to see that there was no ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... rose above the drone of the millstones, and old Gabe stopped with open lips to listen. The boy's face was pressed close to the logs. A wet paddle had flashed into the sunlight from out the bushes across the river. He could ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... led across to the lonely cottage. Holmes tied the dog to the hedge, and we hastened onward. My friend knocked at the little rustic door, and knocked again without response. And yet the cottage was not deserted, for a low sound came to our ears—a kind of drone of misery and despair which was indescribably melancholy. Holmes paused irresolute, and then he glanced back at the road which he had just traversed. A brougham was coming down it, and there could be ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... place among double-reed instruments the various bagpipes, cornemuses, and musettes, which are shawm or oboe instruments with reservoirs of air, and furnished with drones inclosing single reeds. I shall have more to say about the drone in the third lecture. In restricting our attention to the Highland bagpipe, with which we are more or less familiar, it is surprising to find the peculiar scale of the chaunter, or finger pipe, in an old Arabic scale, still prevailing in Syria and Egypt. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... The drone of the cockchafer, as he wheels by you in drowsy hum, sounds his corno di bassetto on F below the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... laugh at him. Aye, Casey would have laughed! .... They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... skillful weaver at his clumsy loom; The miller at his millstones grinding meal; The armorer, linking his shirts of mail; The money-changer at his heartless trade; The gaping, eager crowd gathered to watch Snake-charmers, that can make their deadly charge Dance harmless to the drone of beaded gourds; Sword-players, keeping many knives in air; Jugglers, and those that dance on ropes swung high: And all this varied work and busy idleness As ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... illustrations are poor in themselves, and are not assisted by the surrounding phraseology. We have seen how in the Republic, and in the earlier dialogues, figures of speech such as 'the wave,' 'the drone,' 'the chase,' 'the bride,' appear and reappear at intervals. Notes are struck which are repeated from time to time, as in a strain of music. There is none of this subtle art in the Laws. The illustrations, such as the ...
— Laws • Plato
... windows with green outer blinds on each of its two sides, and a door at the end nearer the road. As Webb traversed the open space, where, on Sundays, horses were hitched to the trees and saplings, a drone as of countless bees fell on his ears. To a native this needed no explanation. During five of the week-days the building was used as a schoolhouse. The sound was made by the students studying aloud, and John's niece, Dolly Drake, had sole charge ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... then produce These rugged ponies, lean and spruce? Are these the steers of Accomac That do the negro's drone obey? The things of childhood all come back: The wonder tales of mother day! The jail, the inn, the ivy vines That yon old English churchside cloak, Wherein we read the stately lines Of Addison, writ in his signs, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... it. And no wonder! Ten thousand paroquets shrieking passionately, like a hundred knife-grinders at work, is no joke; especially when their melodies are mingled with the discordant cries of herons, and bitterns, and cranes, and the ceaseless buzz and hum of insects, like the bagpipe's drone, and the dismal croaking of boat-bills and frogs,—one kind of which latter, by the way, doesn't croak at all, but whistles, ay, better than many a bird! The universal hubbub is tremendous! I tell you, ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... perhaps a better life. The blue-jays stop their harsh teasing screams now and then to toll a clear, musical passing bell for these, and the nuthatches are goblin gabriels blowing eerie trumps of resurrection to which the spirits of the bee people drone a second as they wing their way onward. The great white town of the white-faced hornets is conspicuous on the blueberry bush down in the far corner and within it are the husks of a few of its once roaringly busy ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... to darkness. The woods were full of gloom. A timorous star palpitated in the sky. In the sudden stillness when the bark-mill ceased its whir, the mountain torrent hard by lifted a mystic chant. The drone of the katydid vibrated in the laurel, and the shrill-voiced cricket chirped. Two of the men were in the shed examining a green hide by the light of a perforated tin lantern, that seemed to spill the rays in glinting white rills. As they flickered across ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... I can answer you," said the book-hawker. "I was once a monk, a lazy drone. Our convent was rich, and we had nothing to do except to appear for so many hours every day in church, and repeat or chant words, of the sense of which we did not for a moment trouble ourselves. Copies of the blessed gospel, however, were brought among us, and certain ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there was no ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... but a body without a soul. It was I who had uttered words which were painful and astounding to one conscious of unimpugnable motives. In the days of toil to come, we were reminded, the Young Person, to wit, myself, would have no share. She would be but skeptic, critic, drone in the busy hive. Thus it was obvious that the Young Person could not with any trace of justice claim part or lot in the treasure. Were it not well, then, that the Young Person be required to make formal and written ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... virtue could charm him, no vice shock him. He had about him a natural good manner, which seemed to qualify him for the highest circles, and yet he was never out of place in the lowest. He had no principle, no regard for others, no self-respect, no desire to be other than a drone in a hive, if only he could, as a drone, get what honey was sufficient for him. Of honey, in his latter days, it may probably be presaged, that he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Buddhism is in a bad state. One writer calls it, "The emasculated descendant that now occupies the land with its drone of priests and its temples, in which scarce a worthy disciple of the learned patriarchs of ancient days is to be found. Received with open arms, persecuted, patronized, smiled upon, tolerated, it with the last phase of its existence, has reached, not the halcyon days of peace ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... The steady drone of a baritone voice as I alighted from my car and approached the first tee told me that George had not forgotten the tryst. He was sitting on the stone seat under the chestnut-tree, speaking a few well-chosen ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus of harsh-throated crows, the strident creaking of cart- wheels, the buzz and drone of insect swarms and the rattle call of the tree lizards; men whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool grey skies and wet turf and moist ploughlands of an English hunting country, men whose memories listened yearningly to the music of a deep-throated ...
— When William Came • Saki
... outlet before. It was a pleasant little long narrow nook, between the printing-house on the west, and such another garden on the east, a like slip, with a wall masked by ivy and lilacs, and overshadowed by a horse-chestnut meeting it on the south. It was not smoky, and was quite quiet, save for the drone and stamp of the steam-press; there was grass, a gum-cistus and some flower- beds in the centre, and a gravel-walk all round, bordered by narrow edgings of flowers, and with fruit trees against ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity of the page she had opened her note-book ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... that slanted into the valley and crossed the half-mile of "flats" whose wire fences and long, clean-cut irrigation ditches marked the passing of the cattle country. A billion mosquitoes filled the air with an unceasing low-pitched drone, and settled upon the horses in a close-fitting blanket of gray. The girls tried to fight off the stinging pests that attacked their faces and necks in whirring clouds. But they fought in vain and in vain they endeavored to urge the horses to a quickening of their pace, for impervious alike ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows, Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum drone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes, Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. Chee, chee, ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... remembered as a whitewashed praying box, resounding to his father's high-pitched voice. It was filled with heat and flies from without in summer, and heat and steam from within in winter. The school, whitewashed again, he recalled as a succession of banging desks, flying paper pellets, and the drone of undigested lessons. Here the water bucket loomed as the alleviation in summer, or the red hot oblong of the open stove in winter time. Through all these scenes, by an egotistical trick of the brain, he saw himself moving, a small brown- ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... of women who wish to bear children, but who seem to be anxious to reduce the father to the position of the drone-bee. He is to have no part in the child after its birth. The duty of caring for it and bringing it up is to be undertaken by the mother, aided, when necessary, by the State. This is a terrible injustice against the father and the child. It seems to me to be the great and insuperable difficulty ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a Glass } But mentions none of that when with his Lass, } He's Knave in Grain; a Blockhead and an Ass. } Because a Cuckold's Life was his hard fate, Must Wedlock be abused at this rate? Because he had a strumpit for his Wife, He now commends a mopish single Life. Let him content himself to live a Drone, In some dark Corner of the World alone; And trouble not his Brains with our blest State, Which now is far above his wretched fate; He talks of prayers a little while before, And then he curss'd his Wife and call'd her whore. Oh! meddley of confusion, never worse, Must pray, ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... a pity that some people you knew, not a thousand miles away, couldn't go to the School of the Bees, and learn that line from Watts about Satan finding mischief for idle hands to do. And Joyce said yes, it was too bad for a fine fellow to get into trouble just because he was a drone, and had no ambition to make anything of himself; that if Alaka had gone to the School of the Bees he wouldn't have lost his eyes. And then you said that if somebody kept on he would at least lose his turquoises. Do ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... lay revolving this business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain as this, falling in the black ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... carefully arranged broken wires in the empty house not more than a block away from the Citadel Square. Then of those other wires in the temple of the Shining One, spluttering their wicked-looking sparks. She strained her ears to catch the humming drone of the engines in the House of Power, but there was no sound to be heard—they could ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill. When cicadae, crickets, and frogs unite, their music may be heard at the distance of a ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... road by which they should come. The night was fine, but overcast by light clouds of grey mist, through which the moon pierced but very faintly. More than once her hopes were raised by the sound of hoofs, and dashed to the ground by the drone of wheels or by the appearance of a fat farmer jogging home. She asked more than one if they had seen a man on a brown horse and two children on ponies, but they only answered "no," and wished her civilly good night. In this way the rumour passed ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... Honoured by my friendship, but not ready to accept me as his daughter's suitor! As if I would lounge away hours that mean dollars to me in his stiff old drawing-room, just to hear his everlasting drone about stocks up and stocks down, and politics gone all wrong. He has heard that I play cards, and—How pretty she looked! I believe I half like that girl, and when I think she has a million in her ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... up, and still up, unfalteringly speeds the Pilot and his mount. Sweet the drone of the Engine and steady the Thrust as the Propeller ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... the open air under a sky, with fresh winds blowing about one. He tried to picture on that dull strip of metal overhead a stretch of green grass, a tree, even the blue sky and floating white clouds. But the patch remained stubbornly gray, the murmur of Wonstead went on and on, a drone in his aching ears, the throb of the ship's life beat ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... with an angry impatience the flicker of a leer on the darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string of words, a dull chant, level like an incantation, inevitably apt to the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... down, and when the road, looking white in the moonlight, had turned gloomy and black, save where it was splashed by the silvery light on the trees of the forest patch into which they had passed, they began to nod upon their horses, and the King's voice grew as he talked into an incoherent drone. ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... beaver, The beaver is a very instinctive animal. There are several varieties, The Dam Builder, The Bank Beaver, The Bachelor Beaver and the Drone Beaver. The beaver ranges in color from white to black. I never saw a white one, and but one black one except when I looked in the glass. The Beaver weighs from twenty to thirty pounds in the United States, and from forty ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... and a prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, but it was easy to see that they did not like his wakefulness ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... territories by the sobriquet of Ben Buzz—extensively as to distances, if not as to people. By the voyageurs, and other French of that region, he was almost universally styled le Bourdon^ or the "Drone"; not, however, from his idleness or inactivity, but from the circumstances that he was notorious for laying his hands on the products of labor that proceeded from others. In a word, Ben Boden was a "bee-hunter," and as ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth below ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... distances. I will keep it in mind. It is a complete perplexity to me, and yet certainly insects can rudely somehow judge of distance. There are special difficulties on account of the gradation in size between the worker-scells and the larger drone-cells. I am trying to test the case practically by getting combs of different species, and of our own bee from different climates. I have lately had some from the W. Indies of our common bee, but ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the fitful chimney-roar, The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The mud of ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... little night sounds to which she had grown accustomed: the bellowing of frogs in the sedges, the chirp of tree-toads, and the harsh squawk of startled night-fowls. Even the air seemed unnaturally still, and the ceaseless drone of the mosquitoes served but to intensify the unnatural silence. The mosquitoes broke the spell of the nameless terror, and she slapped viciously at her face ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... marriage, in an elegant house, and full business, the dinner over, and they gone up to the drawing-room. Think how agreeable and graceful it would be for Mrs. Daniel O'Connell to repair to the sofa, among a few respectable friends, and, taking up her bagpipes, set her elbow a-going, until the drone gives two or three broken groans, and the chanter a squeak or two, like a child in the cholic, or a cat that you had trampled on by accident. Then comes the real ould Irish music, that warms the heart. Dan looks upon her graceful position, until ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier smell, while without all was gloomy, dark, and drear. No wonder, then, that when ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... keen delight turned to dismay, and when he had turned the last thin page his brain was in wildest turmoil. He thought he must be dreaming. He turned sick, aching eyes upon his surroundings to prove this thing a nightmare, but the prosaic clink of a typewriter and the drone of a voice dictating quotations on Brazilian coffee were conclusive evidence to the contrary. Those pages between his thumb and finger were real. Yes, and that was Rosa's writing. Could it be that he had misunderstood anything? ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... hot, and the silence of high noon lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid. At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and trailed slowly to silence again. Everywhere were pungent, aromatic smells. The vast, moveless heat seemed to distil countless odors from the brush—odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and above all the medicinal odor of witch hazel. As far as one could ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... together—at least Toad was talking, and Rat was saying at intervals, "Yes, precisely; and what did you say to him?"—and thinking all the time of something very different, when far behind them they heard a faint warning hum, like the drone of a distant bee. Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out the dust a faint "Poop-poop!" wailed like an uneasy animal in pain. Hardly regarding it, they turned ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... paragon that some writers have pictured, she was a splendid home-loving American woman, brave in heart and helpful to her husband, neither a drone nor a drudge—in the true Scriptural sense a worthy woman who sought wool and flax and worked willingly with her hands. As such her ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... a great drone, for he prefers the chimney-corner to the field, even although it cannot have been very cold if the weather was open enough to admit of ploughing. And he is a great fool, too, for he buys his comfort at a very dear price, as do all men who live for to-day, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all the lights went out, for the fire-flies fled in every direction; but in the darkness Twinkle thought she could still hear the drone of the big bass fiddle and the flute-like trill ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, which made up for his stupidity; we had a single agreeable ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... rough bench before it and looked at the jars beside him, lifted his hand and opened a compact, but thoroughly efficient field wireless "set." His right fingers dropped to the key, and the whining drone of the wireless rose higher and higher as he tuned up. He reached for his receivers, ducked his head and adjusted them with one hand, and sent a call spitting tiny blue sparks from the key ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh," went the drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... minutes later Ba-ree loosened his teeth and drew back a step to look at the crumpled and motionless creature before him. The jay was dead. He had won his first battle. And with victory came the wonderful dawning of that greatest instinct of all, which told him that no longer was he a drone in the marvelous mechanism of wilderness life—but a part of it from this time forth. For he ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... till each heather stalk Is delicately fringed. The sycamores, Through all their mystical entanglement Of boughs, are draped with silver. All the green Of sweet leaves playing with the subtle air In dainty murmuring; the obstinate drone Of limber bees that in the monk's-hood bells House diligent; the imperishable glow Of summer sunshine never more confessed The harmony of nature, the divine, Diffusive spirit of the beautiful. Out in the snowy dimness, half ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... Malmsey! Muscadel!"— As the last canto ceased, the Mermaid Inn Chorussed. I flew from laughing voice to voice; But, over all the hubbub, rose the drone Of Francis Bacon,—"Now, this Muscovy Is a cold clime, not favourable to bees (Or love, which is a weakness of the south) As well might be supposed. Yet, as hot lands Gender hot fruits and odoriferous ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... necessary questions. The squirrels were always friendly, and gave them nuts out of their own hoards; but the bees were selfish and rude, justifying themselves on the ground that Tangle and Mossy were not subjects of their queen, and charity must begin at home, though indeed they had not one drone in their poorhouse at the time. Even the blinking moles would fetch them an earth-nut or a truffle now and then, talking as if their mouths, as well as their eyes and ears, were full of cotton wool, or their own velvety fur. By the time they got out of the forest they ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... swung to and fro in the sunshine as they climbed the Doctor's whitewashed porch. Big bees hummed their sleepy drone from the fragrant hearts of the flowers, and a humming-bird whirred busily in and out in search of the honeysuckle that he loved. Up-stairs Mrs. Morgan was darning stockings in the coolest room in the house,—a bedroom with a northern exposure. A white shirt-waist ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... one in the earth-borer spoke—didn't even try to—for though the thunder of the disintegrators was muted, inside, to a steady drone, conversation was almost impossible. The three were crowded quite close in the spherical inner control compartment. Sue sat on a little collapsible stool by the bowed, but by no means subdued, figure of Professor David Guinness, while Quade sat on ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... priestly craft; thou who hast suffered sorely, even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono,—the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the Praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers; and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the church of the Ara ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... now at home beyond the sea, and it is not strange faces he will be seein', but the lads and lassies of the Glen, and it is John McNeash who holds the drone under his arm and the chanter in his hands, and the salty tang of the sea comes up to him and the peat-smoke is in his nostrils, and the pipes skirl higher and higher as Tonald McKenzie dances the dance of his ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... not too late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined something deep, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... derived from Turkish beg armudi, prince's pear. With beg, prince, cf. bey and begum. The burden of a song is from Fr. bourdon, "a drone, or dorre-bee; also, the humming, or buzzing, of bees; also, the drone of a bag-pipe" (Cotgrave). It is of doubtful origin, but is not related to burden, a load, which is connected ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... that was what Allaphair seemed to be doing herself. He saw them sitting in the porch together alone, going out to milk or to the woodpile. Passing her gate one flower-scented dusk, he heard the drone of their voices behind the morning-glory vines and heard her laugh quite humanly. He snorted his disgust, but once when he saw the girl walking home with the teacher from school he seethed with rage and ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... The drowsy drone of honey-laden bees, The poppied breath of gardens blooming fair, The scent of elder blossoms, sweet and rare, Come stealing in on balmy southern breeze; And dying lays, whose long lost melodies Still haunt old storied ruins everywhere, Are dimly floating through the ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... thumping of stocking feet ceased with the drone of the drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees, then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr. Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... loved their kinsman for his kindness to them. He became attached to them as helpmates; and the end of it all was, he came to Socrates and told him with delight how matters fared; "and now," he added, "they tax me with being the only drone in the house, who sit and eat the bread ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... became complete, save for the stamping of the impatient horses and the drone of insects in the woods and grass. Dick, lying on his stomach and using his glasses, could see nothing in the forest before them. It was to him in all its aspects an Indian battle, and he believed in spite of what Warner had said that the enemy ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... now that the evenings are so long, Whinnie takes my laddie on his knee and tells him stories, stories which he can't possibly understand, I'm sure, but Dinkie likes the drone of Whinnie's voice and the feel of those rough old arms about his little body. We all hunger for affection. The idiot who said that love was the bitters in the cocktail of life wasn't either a good liver or a good philosopher. For love is really ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... at the pains o' such a clamoring? Sure thou hast heard that old tale o'er a hundred times; and thou too, my lord? Fie, then! Wouldst seek to flatter thy old nurse with this seeming eagerness? Go to! I say thou canst not in truth want to hear me drone o'er that ancient narrative. Well, then, an I must, I must. Soft! Hold my fan betwixt thy dainty cheeks and the blaze, sweetheart, lest the fire-fiend witch thy roses into very poppy flowers. And thou, my lord, ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when, looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver hair had already turned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness that we had entered ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... as is not utterly uncommon, quite a few maids and matrons among the households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights—the major ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... entered the inn, and, guided by the drone of voices, sauntered into the bar. At sight of Mr. Caryll leaning there, his little eyes beamed an instant, as do the eyes of one who espies a friend, or—apter figure—the eyes of the hunter when they sight ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of answer came the soft drone of a high-powered motor; then the car itself rolled into view, a stately limousine coming from the direction of the avenue de Friedland. Before the corner house it stopped. A lackey alighted with an umbrella ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... fathers before him Sang in their Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom, that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's songs and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause of the song, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... before he drops asleep. When he comes to church the same phenomenon occurs. He cannot resist the soporific tendencies of the furnaces. By the time Mr. Work gets fairly into secondly, Farmer Faragon is sound asleep. So he does not even listen to the preaching. Is he then a drone? Suppose you make a calculation how many mouths he feeds indirectly by the products of his farm. I cannot even guess. But I know nothing ever goes from it that is not good. The child is happy that drinks his milk, the butcher fortunate who buys his beef, the housewife ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... Of a lazy drone, And a bed on a cushioned knee; But in wild free ways I will spend my days, And at night on the roofs ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... tossed and writhed through the hours, while Barry slumbered peacefully and breathed in new strength. Little was aware of a subtle drone and hum all around the place; he placed it to the further credit of pestiferous insects and cursed them dully. From the river crept in a rank odor of musk and mud that mingled with the sleepy sounds to lull him, yet his ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... I locked the drone, And left him to feed there all alone In the honey-cells of his golden hive: Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan Was heard from those massive walls of stone, Nor again was the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... butcherous slaughter of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "But it's not ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... he knew belonged to the lord. Measuring himself by his own standard, regarding that man to be most manly who could be most useful in the world, he did think himself to be infinitely superior to the Earl. He was the working bee, whereas the Earl was the drone. And he was one who used to the best of his abilities the mental faculties which had been given to him; whereas the Earl,—so he believed,—was himself hardly conscious of having had mental faculties bestowed upon him. The Earl was, to his thinking, as were all earls, an excrescence upon ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... said; "not industry alone. Keep good company, my boy. Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... hunter round and dropped sheer for a thousand feet, coming up in a fairly thick bank of white cloud. He there flattened out again and began climbing, not being sure of his altitude. No sooner had his engine begun to drone out the rhythm of its full power, and the good hunter-plane begun to rise majestically, than what should he see but the second enemy fighter right in front of him! A new drum was in place on his Lewis gun, and he let go. The Boche pilot threw up both hands and fell back, and down into ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... the while the wild, weird strain grew louder, and the howling more piteous, till the boat reached the vessel's side, when the drone and squeal of the pipes ceased on the instant, and the dog's howl was changed to a loud, joyous bark, as his handsome head appeared at the gangway, the eyes flashing in the sunlight, ears cocked, and the thick mass of hair about the neck ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn |
